Campbell Brothers – Can You Feel It?
Praise the Lord and pass the headphones, for when the three Campbell Brothers get to “frammin” — which is to say when the guitar, pedal steel and lap steel strum in syncopation — it’s a challenge to tell one instrument from another. But then, since the brothers grew up playing steel-stringed gospel in their father’s House of God Holiness-Pentecostal church, it’s only natural that individual egos are absorbed within a collective “hallelujah.”
Can You Feel It? was produced by John Medeski, the organist in Medeski, Martin & Wood who served a similar function on 2001’s The Word, which included another jam-friendly pedal steel player reared in the church, Robert Randolph. Turns out Randolph got his first steel guitar as a Christmas gift from Chuck Campbell, a virtuoso whose influential prowess on the pedal steel earned him a 2004 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Collections of sacred steel music have lately documented the explosive mix of funk, blues, R&B, jazz and gospel nurtured in the House of God, and the Campbell Brothers bring it all to Can You Feel It? Guitarist Phil Campbell provides rhythmic cushioning throughout and contributes solos born of blues (“Devil Ride”) and jazz (“Frammin”). Chuck Campbell’s heavily distorted, exquisitely controlled pedal steel is the instrumental tie that binds, moving with the snap of a wah-wah pedal from spindly lead lines to resonant washes of harmonic support.
But it’s Darick Campbell’s eight-string lap steel that’s often the melodic soul of the sound. With a tone as beefy as that of a classic-rock guitarist, he virtually inhabits Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”, and, along with his brothers, offers a most subtle “Amazing Grace”. Singer Denise Brown exhorts with her occasional vocals, but it’s the strings that really sing, confirming that the Campbell Brothers make sacred steel music that’s (forgive me Lord) mmm-good.